The Weird Rise of American ‘Refugees’
6th September 2025
Finally, Europe has found a group of refugees who aren’t welcome—Americans.
As reported by Reuters this week, there is a small but growing number of U.S. citizens attempting to claim asylum in Europe, on the grounds that they are transgender. One such individual is Veronica Clifford-Carlos, a 28-year-old artist from San Francisco, who left the U.S. in June this year, hoping to be granted refugee status in the Netherlands. Clifford-Carlos claimed that the U.S. is no longer safe for trans people, and that “I have people screaming ‘faggot’ at me in the street … I have people threatening my life, threatening to assault me, threatening to follow me home and kill my family.”
Shockingly, for a country that normally appears to accept anyone from anywhere, no questions asked, the Netherlands rejected Clifford-Carlos’s application. In August, the American launched a lawsuit against the rejection—the first of its kind. Clifford-Carlos is not, however, alone in fleeing the supposed dystopian hellscape of Trump’s America. The advocacy group backing the lawsuit, LGBT Asylum Support, says it’s currently working with 20 other transgender Americans to make asylum claims. Official data from the Netherlands show that a total of 29 Americans applied for asylum there in the first half of this year, though the reason for each case is not recorded.
It is exceedingly rare for U.S. citizens to be granted asylum in European countries. Usually, this only happens incidentally, when an American dependent of someone with another citizenship—such as a parent—is given refugee status. For the Dutch government—or any European government—to accept an asylum application from America would imply criticism of the U.S. government. This is something that any European government would, understandably, be reluctant to do.